Heroes At Last Of Our Own Legends
by HalfshellVenus1
Summary: Michael/Lincoln light one-sided slash, pre-series through S1: All those failed hopes through the years have never kept Michael from dreaming his own version of the future.


Title: **Heroes At Last Of Our Own Legends**

Author: HalfshellVenus

Characters: Michael/Lincoln (**Light Slash, One-Sided**)  
Rating: K+

Summary (Pre-series through S1): All those failed hopes through the years have never kept Michael from dreaming his own version of the future.  
Author's Notes: Happy Birthday to **etherealflaim**! Hope a little visit to the Prison Break past will bring you some birthday joy.

Also for **fanfic100**, this is "Ends."

x-x-x-x-x

When Michael was very young, he planned to be a fireman some day. He'd never heard of engineering or architecture then, and he had no idea what mathematics and equations would come to mean to him. It was a simple dream for a simple period in his life, a time so long ago that Lincoln as a policeman made sense too. The two of them would take care of all the world's problems, there in that corner of Chicago where he and Lincoln and Mom lived.

Later, after Mom got sick, Michael tried as hard as he could to find solutions for their problems—as if everything would settle down if he could only get _control_. He schemed about starting paper routes, about being an errand boy while Lincoln bagged groceries—whatever might bring in money for the three of them now that Mom had lost her job. He even thought about all of them moving in with Mom's brother in Savannah, anything but the final possibility that she wouldn't make it and that he and Lincoln would be sent to different places, their family splintered into its smallest, loneliest pieces.

In the foster care system, Michael dreamed that his adolescent crush on his brother would be returned, that Lincoln would realize he couldn't live without Michael either, ending the current cycle of the two of them adrift in a world with too many rules and too little feeling. Lincoln would find a way to rescue him, and they'd set up a place of their own and live happily together, where no-one would try to 'fix' them or their situation and instead wind up destroying everything that mattered.

By high school, the whole idea had turned around until it was Michael who would somehow rescue Lincoln, offering him the love and stability that would keep him from chasing the next pretty girl, the next cheap high, or the next easy score. Michael refused to acknowledge the kind of ending where Lincoln spent his life in the gutter or trapped behind bars, with no future to call his own.

For awhile those worst fears were actually realized, first with Lincoln in Fox River as an accessory to burglary, followed later by those dark, terrible years when Lincoln waited on Death Row and Michael was helpless to stop it.

Somehow, a plan managed to surface—one so intricate and close-to-impossible that only Michael could have created it or tried to believe in it. He threw himself into it wholesale, destroying his past and his reputation, all for the domino-theory chance that it would save Lincoln's life. It had to—there were no other possibilities left.

Weeks and a series of miracles later, they were across the walls of Fox River at last, Michael and Lincoln and the group of extra inmates that resulted from negotiations to ensure better chances for safety. Michael scented the air and listened to the forces gathering around them, trying to navigate a new solution now that their airplane was gone and capture was closing in.

He led them on into the darkness, marshalling them toward the first of the many backup plans he'd hatched in the event of this very possibility. Always prepared, always thinking, Michael would never go down without a fight.

With Lincoln there beside him and sunrise only hours away, he could not be certain what morning would bring.

But the chapter in the story of the two of them at Fox River—and everything before—was now finished.

For once, things had gone as he had so desperately hoped, details be damned:

It had ended with another chance.

_-------- fin --------_


End file.
